calljdku912fandomcom-20200214-history
The Read-Write Web
The Read-Write Web I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It was mid-1999, and Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Soft- ware, had called to say there was something I had to see. He showed me a web page. I don’t remember what the page contained except for one button. It said, “Edit This Page”—and, for me, nothing was ever the same again. I clicked the button. Up popped a text box containing plain text and a small amount of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the code that tells a browser how to display a given page. Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page. I made a small change, clicked another button that said, “Save this page” and voila, the page was saved with the changes. The software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the earliest weblog, or blog, applications. Winer’s company was a leader in a move that brought back to life the promise, too long unmet, that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, had wanted from the start. Berners-Lee envisioned a read/write Web. But what had emerged in the 1990s was an essentially read-only Web on which you needed an account with an ISP (Internet service provider) to host your web site, special tools, and/or HTML expertise to create a decent site. Writing on the Net wasn’t entirely new, of course. People had done it for years in different contexts, such as email lists, forums, and newsgroups. Wikis—sites on which anyone could edit any page—also predated weblogs, but they hadn’t gained Much traction outside a small user community, in part because of the techie orientation to the software. What Winer and the early blog pioneers had created was a breakthrough. They said the Web needed to be writeable, not just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead simple. Thus, the read/write Web was truly born again. We could all write, not just read, in ways never before possible. For the first time in history, at least in the developed world, anyone with a computer and Internet connection could own a press. Just about anyone could make the news. About a year and a half later, on November 8, 2000, I was sitting at my desk at the University of Hong Kong where I teach part-time each fall. It was Wednesday morning in Hong Kong, Tuesday evening in the United States, and I was immersed in the U.S. elections muddle that left Americans unsure for weeks that their next president would be. The U.S. television networks’ news programming was unavailable in the university’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre, and local media weren’t spending as much time on the story as I, an American abroad, might have liked. So I made do with the tools I had—and I realized something that seems obvious only in retrospect. I found a National Public Radio streaming-audio feed and listened to it. Meanwhile, I was visiting various web sites such as CNN and key newspapers such as the The New York Times for national perspective and my own San Jose Mercury News for California and hometown coverage. I watched as the map of blue states and red states changed, and drilled in on articles about individual state races. I realized I was getting a better overall report than anyone watching television, listening to the radio, or reading a news- paper in the United States. It was more complete, more varied. In effect, I’d rolled my own news. It was a convergence of old and new media, but the newest component was my own tinkering to create my own news “product”—a compilation of the best material I could find. It was a pale imitation of what we’ll be able to do as the tools become more sophisticated, but it worked. My main focus in this book is on what happens when people at the edges participate in the news-gathering and dis- semination processes. Of course, I have to remind myself that most people will remain—and I dislike this word—consumers of news. Yet even if that’s all they do, they can do it better than at any time in history because technology gives them more choices. (This is one reason why significant numbers of Americans, believing they weren’t getting a fair perspective from the U.S. media, sought out international views during the 2004 Iraq War and run-up to it.)35 The news is what we make of it, in more ways than one. To understand the evolution of tomorrow’s news, we need to understand the technologies that are making it possible. The tools of tomorrow’s participatory journalism are evolving quickly—so quickly that by the time this book is in print, new ones will have arrived. This book’s accompanying web site (http://wethemedia.oreilly.com) will catalogue new tools as they become available. In this chapter, we’ll look more generically at the fundamental technologies. For people who simply want to be better informed, the Internet itself is the key. We have access to a broader variety of current information than ever before, and we can use it with increasing sophistication. For those who want to join the process, the Web is where we merely start. The tools of grassroots journalism run the gamut from the simplest email list, in which everyone on the list receives copies of all messages; to weblogs, journals written in reverse chrono- logical order; to sophisticated content-management systems used for publishing content to the Web; and to syndication tools that Allow anyone to subscribe to anyone else’s content. The tools also include handheld devices such as camera-equipped mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). What they have in common is a reliance on the contributions of individuals to a larger whole, rising from the bottom up. It boils down to this. In the past 150 years we’ve essentially had two distinct means of communication: one-to-many (books, newspapers, radio, and TV) and one-to-one (letters, telegraph, and telephone). The Internet, for the first time, gives us many-to-many and few-to-few communications. This has vast implications for the former audience and for the producers of news because the dif- ferences between the two are becoming harder to distinguish. That this could happen in media is no surprise, given the relatively open nature of the tools, which could be used in ways the designers didn’t anticipate. It’s always been this way in media; every new medium has surprised its inventors in one way or another. At their heart, the technologies of tomorrow’s news are fueling something emergent—a conversation in which the grass- roots are absolutely essential. Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts...And yet somehow out of all this interac- tion some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usu- ally without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up. The environment in which the new tools function, an ecosystem that is gaining strength from diversity. The Web, as it grew up in the 1990s, was a powerful publishing system that journalists of all kinds used to great effect, and still do. But the larger toolkit is part of an expanding, thriving ecosystem. Let’s look inside that toolkit. Before weblogs we had mail lists, and they have not become less important. As noted in Chapter 1, Dave Farber’s “Interesting People” mail list is a news source of enormous value to his readers. It is far from alone. Because I spend time in Asia every year, including a month teaching in Hong Kong each fall, I was extremely interested in the rise of SARS. I wrote several columns about it in early 2003. Soon after one of the columns appeared, I received an email from a Harvard University bioengineering instructor, Henry Niman, who had created several mail lists. One called SARS Sci- ence, he said, “targets medical and scientific information on the epidemic. Members include molecular biologists and scientists from around the world who are studying coronaviruses as well as astroviruses and paramyxoviruses.” Many of the reporters covering the outbreak also subscribed to this list. A second mailing list was for sending news articles about the disease. I joined both. This sequence of writing about something and then hearing from an expert in the field has been a common one for Net- savvy journalists lately. But in a sense, journalists were late finding out what nonjournalists had been doing for years. At last count, there were thousands of mail lists, covering just about every topic one can imagine. Mail lists differ from blogs and standard web sites in at least three respects. First, they serve a specific community, the subscribers, and the community